Pop Mythology's New Look & "A Letter From History"
An end-of-year update on Pop Mythology and an exclusive poem illustrated by Fernando Dagnino
Hello all!!
Welcome to Pop Mythology’s new home!
Some of you probably furrowed your eyebrows this week when a Pop Mythology article arrived in your inbox and I should apologise for the confusion and contribution to your future wrinkles. The reason for sending it was … an accident, pure and simple. I clicked ‘Go’ when I should have clicked ‘Stay’ and that’s on me as a wannabe antiquarian / wizard stuck in a 21st Century desk chair and generally having very little patience for all things technological and ‘modern’.
However it was the harbinger of a new flurry of Pop Mythologies I intend to publish in the new year from here, my very own Substack.
This new version of Pop Mythology will be a slimmed-down affair. I find a lot of comfort in reading about religions from around the world and how they formulated their understanding of themselves and the cosmos through stories. I think they have a lot to offer a modern reader, too even those of us who don’t consider ourselves ‘religious’ at-bloody-all!
So, with this idea as the omphalos of my reading, I’m going to take a “Pop Mythology” (analogous with Pop Psychology, if anybody didn’t get the joke before) approach to myths in a highly localised manner. I’m going to dive into myths to try and help me understand the world around me and my own place in it.
And, since I don’t consider myself all that ‘special’ I’m hoping that this approach will help some of you too and we can even spark some healthy discussions.
But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Wherever possible, I’m still going to accompany the Pop Mythologies with magnificent artwork donated by people like Fernando Dagnino and a slew of others yet to be announced. Including the poem below, which I wrote many years ago and published in a now-defunct online comics project called What Happened When …
I would like to take-up What Happened When … again in the future but, for now, it serves as an excellent analogy for History, in general. You see, I took Alan Moore’s advice about learning how to write comics by writing very short comics indeed.
I asked artist friends to come along on the adventure with me, they agreed, and I learned a hundred ways how NOT to write comics. It was a tough learning experience but I did learn a lot.
This is a lot like how I see the purpose of History.
Yes, it’s full of fun stories, colourful maniacs and lovers out the whazoo but, most of all, it’s full of lessons. I’m looking for answers and I find History and Myths are hiding a lot of them. At least from my very imperfect, very subjective point of view!
What Happened When … put real historical characters up against mythological beings from all over time and place. The following poem was written as if from a character that is History. History speaks as if they were simply a mouthpiece of real people, whose mouths I shamelessly filled with my own words. The characters speak through History and let you know how they feel now they can look back on their own lives. The hubris is palpable, needless to say.
Anyway, here it is, A Letter From History, written by me and illustrated by Fernando Dagnino.
That’s all for now! Thank you so much for staying with me, for reading the mad musings of someone who feels utterly lost in the modern world and is just trying to figure things out through stories, the same way he’s always done.
I hope it helps you too.
A.